The moral rings out at the end of "The Sensitive Plant" with an almost conversational simplicity;
Death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in Adonais:
'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
and again:
The One remains, the many change and pass.
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
In all the musical and visionary glory of Hellas we seem to hear a subtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in a dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a prayer. At one moment Shelley toys with the dreary sublimity of the Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the secular blaze, which became for mediæval Christianity the Dies irae. And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity. That nightmare haunts Shelley in Hellas:
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river,
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the "motto" of a symphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.